Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature - Exclusion as Innovation (Electronic book text, New edition)

Sheila Cordner

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Sheila Cordner traces a tradition of literary resistance to
dominant pedagogies in nineteenth-century Britain, recovering an
overlooked chapter in the history of thought about education. This
book considers an influential group of writers - all excluded from
Oxford and Cambridge because of their class or gender - who argue
extensively for the value of learning outside of schools
altogether. From just beyond the walls of elite universities, Jane
Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, and George
Gissing used their position as outsiders as well as their intimate
knowledge of British universities through brothers, fathers, and
friends, to satirize rote learning in schools for the working
classes as well as the education offered by elite colleges. Cordner
analyzes how predominant educational rhetoric, intended to
celebrate England's progress while simultaneously controlling the
spread of knowledge to the masses, gets recast not only by the four
primary authors in this book but also by insiders of universities,
who fault schools for their emphasis on memorization. Drawing upon
working-men's club reports, student guides, educational pamphlets,
and materials from the National Home Reading Union, as well as
recent work on nineteenth-century theories of reading, Cordner
unveils a broader cultural movement that embraced the freedom of
learning on one's own.